Galaxy Trucker

Overview

You’ve built a spaceship. It’s got random parts like guns pointing every which way, some pods for your crew, a rocket thruster or two except the one pointing sideways won’t really work, cargo holds, and even some shields, even if you might’ve forgotten to add batteries that power those shields. It’s structural integrity is suspect, but dammit, it’s your ship! No one else can lay claim to such a beauty. By golly, you’re gonna send it out into space to face pirates, slavers, meteor swarms, diseases, and saboteurs with the hope of bringing back a bounty of loot if it’s the last thing you do. Actually, it may very well be the last thing you do. Welcome to the world of the Galaxy Trucker.

Galaxy Trucker is a board game for 2-4 people. The game itself is divided into 4 phases. In the first phase, you enter a mad scramble to build your trusty spaceship from a collection of spare parts. In the second phase, you look in disbelief at what you’ve built out of that jumble and feel some sense of elation when you discover everyone else’s ships are just that much worse. In the third phase, you send it out into space to face some unknown dangers. Finally, in the final phase, you collect money based on what place you came in on and how much cargo you’ve collected. Assuming your carefully-crafted beauty was blown up to smithereens after colliding into a stray meteor.

So beware. Once you send your ship out into the interstellar void, your mechanical engineering skills will be sorely tested. Forget to separate crew cabins and you hit an epidemic? Too bad. Wander into a warzone by accident without having enough rockets to get out of there quickly enough? Prepare for a barrage of laser fire. No one said that this would be an easy task except for the job posting that drew you into this venture. But that’s HR’s fault anyway…

Core Mechanics: Putting puzzle pieces together.

Victory Condition: In Galaxy Trucker, the premise is simple: be the player with the most money at the end of three rounds. Money is acquired primarily by which place you finish the race. The person in front once the round is over collects more money than the person in second place and so on. You can also collect money by turning in goods you’ve acquired during the course of the trip. Finally, there are ways to get money by defeating pirates or by even sacrificing your crew members to explore an abandoned ship rich in loot. Just don’t tell them that before sending them in.

Ease of learning: Easy to learn. Ships parts aren’t that hard to explain and players tend to pick up on it fairly quickly. Granted, it might take them a few times building ships before they can build one flawlessly, but that’s only because the process of building up your ship resembles a mad dash and building while under a timer is never easy. There might be some difficulty in explaining how the events work, but when I teach people the game, I just show them the event and describe what happens when I flip over a new event. Most people are cool enough to just roll along with the punches without demanding a complete explanation of every event card.